xvi, 370 pages : 24 cm

James Cusick tells the story of an early-19th-century American plot that went desperately wrong, plunging the United States into an undeclared war for possession of Spanish East Florida and provoking a conflict that would embarrass the president, destroy a colony, and reshape forever the nature of life in the American South. When the administration of James Madison secretly decided to attempt to overthrow the Spanish colony, it set in motion an invasion that could not be halted--the Patriot War, one of the great but little-known conflicts of the early American republic. In March of 1812, on the eve of a major war with Great Britain, the United States became embroiled in a military invasion of the Florida peninsula that escalated into two years of increasing mayhem. Instead of an easy conquest aided by local rebels, the president discovered that his agent, General George Mathews, a former governor of Georgia, had spearheaded a covert and unjustifiable military occupation of Spanish territory. The drastic action stunned national and international sensibilities, and within weeks a public debate was raging about the rightness of American actions. People in Georgia rose in protest over the Spaniards' willingness to use black troops and militia to defend Spanish rights. At the same time, settlers in East Florida, incensed at having a foreign military presence on their soil, began a propaganda campaign in the press to denounce President Madison's actions. The U.S. Army and Georgia militia, assisted by local volunteers known as Patriots, put St. Augustine under siege, seized towns and forts, and destroyed livestock and homesteads; by 1813 warfare had devolved into a vendetta with practically every plantation and farmstead between the Georgia border and Cape Canaveral looted or consigned to flames

Includes bibliographical references (pages 349-362) and index

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